


with fear and trembling

by rjosettes



Series: Tumblr Fics [13]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Bondage, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Manhandling, Masturbation, Power Dynamics, Sub Jackson Whittemore, Violent Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-01
Updated: 2017-06-01
Packaged: 2018-11-07 14:41:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11061117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rjosettes/pseuds/rjosettes
Summary: “There should be a word for a threat that is also a promise. Because that is what I want you to hold me down and do. (I love you)” - A Softer World





	with fear and trembling

**Author's Note:**

  * For [katarama](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katarama/gifts).



> Prompted to me at Tumblr by my girlfriend. 
> 
> Brief clarification: this story is set between seasons 2 and 3a; however, I won't be marking this as underage because I personally think the canon makes more sense if Jackson is a few years older than Scott and co. He can be read as eighteen or nineteen in this story, having just graduated (or not, depending on how badly the kanima situation blew up his senior year).
> 
> Yes, the title quotes a Bible verse.

Jackson had missed fear. Not anxiety, the ever-creeping sensation always just behind him, no matter how fast he drove or how hard he threw. No matter how much he drank. Anxiety sends him dry heaving and quivering into bathroom stalls and locker room showers, anything to mask the cold sweat above his brow. Anxiety is….unease. It makes him sick.

Fear was something he thought he’d left in childhood. He’d been scared of the dark until one night he wasn’t, the nightlight sent to the can on the curb. There had been, briefly, the summer of ‘06 fear of cats, but that had been justified. And then his life had become a bundle of raw nerves, one short-circuit to the next, but there was never anything to fear. The dark was safe and welcome. The world was orderly, almost cruelly so. All he had to do was keep up. Get ahead. Be better, be someone. Be worth it.

So when he’s shoved face-first into the lockers, pinned by terrifying, unexpected force - the dude had looked about six seconds from falling out - it feels….new. His heart doesn’t flutter-skip, rapid hummingbird wing beat of anxiety. It throbs, searing hot inside his chest, leaves him panting even when the pressure disappears. Leaves him dabbing at the blood on the back of his neck, shivering at the sting of his own touch.

The second time Derek Hale shoves him against a locker, they’re alone. Alone in a way that’s deliberate, predatory. He’d been so close and Jackson had thought, _do something_. With Derek’s fingertips at his throat, the way he leaned in and in, he’d thought, _do something to me. Do anything._ And he had been afraid. Terrified and thrilled and aware of his flushed bare skin, the heat in his cheeks.

It never happened. Even when it had all come out, when Derek had bitten him. And after, when things went wrong, when he wasn’t good enough for what he was given. It was obvious then that everything sick in him was slipping to the surface. He left stains on everything he touched. And Derek…Derek had backed away from him, eyes haunted, and disappeared.

Jackson has a hard time remembering much beyond that. The times when he was….something else. That was all a blank, of course. But there are times - times like with Allison, the shit that makes his blood run cold as much as the bodies left in his wake - that he seemed to sleep inside his very human body. To bow out as long as Matt needed him to. What was done with claw and fang and tail? It’s ugly, but he can bear it. When he looks down at his own hands, spotless and neat, he remembers they’re not innocent either. He feels the guilt like something heavy and honed, deep in his gut, dragging him down as it cuts.

When they fix him - and that’s the way they think of it, like he isn’t dead still, like nothing ever happened - Derek isn’t satisfied. There are other things to be thinking about, like where werewolf Romeo and Juliet have run off to, but he insists on making Jackson safe. Something no one has to fear.

Control is wired into every cell of his being, so the whole premise is stupid. Derek’s methods are nothing like the bizarre public stunts he’d seen McCall and Stilinski pulling when all of this was nothing but the itch at the back of his neck, the twinge in the depth of his dreams. There’s a military brusqueness to the ‘training’, like something learned by rote and passed on with no thought to the individual. He shifts back and forth as often as he’s asked to, until he’s exhausted with it, until he can wring two, three orgasms out of himself at night without a flash of blue glinting back at him in the mirror. He pretends he doesn’t know why once isn’t enough anymore. Marks it down to Lydia blocking his number.

The first time they fight, they call it sparring. Jackson holds his own for a while, counting on everything that’s so useful to him in lacrosse. He’s fast, not as bulky as Derek, ducking in and out of his reach. It feels like shadow-boxing, neither of them quite connecting, frustration starting to crawl beneath his skin.

“How is this helping?” he asks from a safe distance, sliding through the brush at the edge of the clearing and into the woods. “I don’t fucking come here to play tag.”

Bark slices the skin of his bare back, shirt pushed up between the tree and Derek’s grip like steel. “I didn’t fucking come here to teach kindergarten.” Jackson watches him glance down at their feet - Derek’s planted firmly, Jackson’s balanced on just barely more than his toes - and scoff. “What do you expect me to do, hit you?”

He doesn’t so much say yes as he _breathes_ it, feeling almost weightless when he half-heartedly kicks out, held up only by the palm pressed to the center of his chest. They meet eyes for just a moment, the space of one hard heartbeat rapping against his chest, against Derek’s hand, and then he’s on the ground, wincing.

Peeling the shirt from his back at home is a small, private agony, the sticky warmth of his blood clinging to the fabric. In the mirror, he reaches for the edge of the longest scratch, still damp, not so much as scabbed over. Wounds from an alpha, right? Or from a tree. He’s not sure which counts.

By the time he gets around to running the shirt through the wash, it’s too late. He loses a few more to neat slices and jagged tears, to his own blood and Derek’s. They stop calling it sparring.

* * *

He’s ninety percent sure Derek takes them back through shift control again and again just to wear away at his frazzled nerves. When the full moon is closer, a night away, he takes care to show off. There’s nothing he wants more than to spite the alpha, show him he’s different. McCall sank his anchor in a port he can no longer call home; Lahey is almost as pathetic and twice as fucked up. Jackson buries the strings of control deep, far down where no one has touched. Where no one can pull on them again. Full moon or not, he’ll keep it together.

He’s on edge all day, in and out of his shower, cold water first and then scalding hot when he gives into the urge to curl a hand around his dick. He feels the sting at the back of his neck, between his shoulder blades. He feels it in his side, the place where teeth had sank into him smooth as a hot knife through butter, like he’d been made for it. Like he was soft right where Derek had needed him to be. Come splatters the tile wall and he breathes steam for long minutes, letting this exist just a little longer before he steps back into the bought air of his perfect bedroom, everything scented like designer cologne and old blood.

It was supposed to be all of them that night. Jackson’s sure of it, mostly because he offered up a great deal of bitching at the idea of the four of them out together, McCall and Lahey the only two who actually got along among them. Worse, Stilinski might’ve gotten the wild hair to come along. But when he shows up at the Hale house (Hale ruins?), there’s only Derek propped against the one sturdy porch column, fidgeting with something in his hands.

“I was aiming for fashionably late,” he says by way of greeting, peering deeper into the charred building for anyone else. “Have we skipped from tag to hide and go seek?”

“No,” Derek says flatly, not bothering to glance up from the disc he’s turning over in his fingers. “Not that you could track anyone more than a few hundred feet if we had.”

He’s like this, Jackson has learned. Dismissive. The kind of attitude that got more than one kid taped to a bench in the locker room. It’s not mocking, exactly, because Derek doesn’t….care. Which is worse. A million times worse, and everything he’d driven out of himself at home and on the run here is screaming through his body again.

“So the losers stood you up,” he counters carefully. “That’s gotta be a low point, even for you.”

The gaze that fixes on him is bright red, luminescent in the dusk settling around them. His breath stutters somewhere between mouth and lungs, caught. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

Jackson swallows. And again when the lump in his throat doesn’t budge. “You don’t give me much choice. Last time you came to my window. I’m not spending my own money fixing a roof you fucked up.” There’s a pause, no acknowledgment that he’d done anything wrong. Like he’s just…entitled to it. To Jackson. “Are you going to lock me up again?”

Last month he’d been antsy in the chains, pacing to take advantage of the little leeway he’d had until Derek had strung them to the wall. Said Jackson was making him nervous. He’d looked just fine, no more or less constipated than usual. There hadn’t been a problem, in the end. Not the way there had been with Erica and Boyd, the story he’d heard that had led to the chains in the first place. Even Scott the pacifist had been playing bondage games every full moon for a while, there.

“Do you need it?”

He tries to wet his lips and realizes his tongue has gone just as dry. Thinking of the cold metal against the hot thump of his pulse. Thinking of Derek, control slipping, the eyes only the first to go as the night wears on. “I mean,” he stalls, too aware of everything he can hear and smell, and of how much more Derek can. “Probably.”

* * *

The carving on the disk is the tattoo on Derek’s back. It’s dark enough now that he shouldn’t be able to see, but his new eyes can make out the fine grain of the wood beneath the stain and sealant. He watches the tip of one claw follow each spiral to the center and back, faint scratch seeming to echo in the silence between them. He’s not sure the claws are out on purpose. The sound of them travels up his spine in small shivers.

“Does that do something?” Jackson asks, easing his weight from one foot to the other, trying to do something to make up for the sound of his heartbeat in the quiet dark. The chain clinks against itself, against the wood. “Or do you just like playing with it?”

Derek’s eyes have dulled, but not by much, a blood red that doesn’t have much moonlight to reflect. “Could be both,” he says, and there’s something, the shape of the words, the curl of his mouth. “Not everything I like to play with is useless.” He almost sounds like he’s having fun, like he’s just fucking around with Jackson, and it almost, _almost_ looks like he’s smiling. It’s just the way his lips fall around the sharp new angles jutting against them. “It’s nothing.”

“Alpha, beta, omega, right? Something to remind you that you’re top dog?” The hairs on the back of his neck stand up at the quiet rumbling from the corner. He’s still new at some of this, sorting out each sense, but he can smell something rolling off Derek with the sound, like they’re one and the same. “Must be hard to remember when your little mutts keep running off. Rather be strays than stay here with you.”

He’s expecting the jolt, sudden force and all that comes with it, but Derek takes his time crossing the floor between them. Silent. Jackson hasn’t thought of that since - well, since this afternoon. The deliberate silence, the chance of Derek being around any corner he turns, of him creeping close enough to breathe against the back of Jackson’s neck without being heard. The edge of the beam he’s chained to bites into his back, but there’s no pain. He splits his own bottom lip with his front teeth, salt-copper spilling onto his tongue, and feels nothing but his pounding pulse in every part of him.

Face to face, all of Derek’s features are thrown into sharp relief. The flutter of the shift is just beneath the surface of his skin, so close he can see it, the edge between human and animal. Jackson can hear all of the bones in his jaw click as he fights it back, one second at a time, and he’s…afraid. Fucking terrified, breath coming quick, a dizziness he hasn’t felt since the first time. Derek could split him, shred him, take him apart just enough that he would come back together again, good as new. Something always fresh to play with.

He shuts his eyes when he feels the phantom pressure of fangs to his throat, so close he thinks it’s done already, before Derek’s mouth slides to his ear. “If they’re strays,” he murmurs, that same hint of dark amusement in his voice, “then what does that make you?” The warm, broad lines of his body press closer long enough to feel the way that Jackson is both hard and trembling, hanging in the balance between panic and pleasure. The soft sound after caresses his skin, hot and damp - a laugh.

He doesn’t have to answer. Jackson doesn’t even have to acknowledge it, not with the part of his mind that he has to live with every day. They both know, and the knowing passes between them like a kiss without the kindness. A promise made into a threat. A parting gift.

When the howls start to echo deep in the woods, two baying mutts and a jagged roar, he howls back. The house shakes around him, empty and fragile, and he screams in this new language, buried deeper than words. He howls until his throat is raw with it, and he spends each moment ‘til sunrise swallowing against it, the feeling that doesn’t fade. Derek is brusque again when he turns up with the keys, dirt-smeared hands leaving rings at Jackson’s wrists.

He carries them home, the shape of those fingers and the ache of his throat, and wonders if they’ll ever be real. He’s not sure which answers scares him more.


End file.
